What If Trump Is Right About America?

It's time to ask some hard questions about ourselves.

(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Donny from the Bronx

One of the Trump campaign’s beliefs about 2024 is that the the former president’s criminal indictments will help him with black voters. The theory is, since Trump is an (alleged) criminal, many black people who are also criminals(?), will begin to support him.

This may sound racist, but we know that Trump believes it because he’s said it explicitly. But we also know it because yesterday he held a rally in the Bronx where his campaign handed out posters of his mugshot and welcomed onto the stage two black (alleged) gang members who are currently indicted as part of a criminal conspiracy for crimes that include murder, attempted murder, and a dozen shootings.

These two (alleged) gang members endorsed Trump.

I can’t tell you why Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow endorsed the former president. Maybe they have strong feelings on tariffs. Maybe they believe that NATO membership represents a dangerous entanglement for American interests. Maybe they think that the family separation policy from Trump’s first term was misunderstood and actually represented a reasonable deterrent to undocumented immigrants.

Or maybe they just like Trump because he’s an (alleged) criminal, too. He’s just like them.

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What if Trump is right about the black vote? Not that he’ll win a majority, but if he were to take 20 percent—or even 15 percent—of the African-American vote it will hurt Biden. He’s currently polling in the low 20s with blacks.

But more than that, what if Trump is right about America?

Because as unpleasant as it is to acknowledge, Trump has been right about a great many things.

(1) Republican voters. For 40 years it was dogma that Republican voters wanted a president who blended social and fiscal conservatism and waited his turn to run.

In 2016, Trump understood that Republican voters no longer wanted any of those things. They wanted the craziest son-of-a-bitch available.

(2) The Republican party. The GOP looked like a formidable, disciplined gatekeeper. Trump understood that it was weak and would go along with whatever a man of pure will demanded of it.

(3) The Conservative movement. For three generations conservatives pretended that they cared about policy ideas, such as restrained spending, small government, free trade, and robust foreign policy. Trump understood that the Conservative movement only cared about triggering libs and that so long as he made liberals unhappy, conservatives would take whatever he gave them.

(4) Presidential politics. National politics has long been forward-looking and results oriented. Voters liked and rewarded presidents who passed legislation and talked about the future instead of re-litigating the past. As president, Trump was indifferent to legislating—his major accomplishments were a tax cut and criminal justice reform. As a 2024 candidate, Trump has basically no legislative proposals and spends most of his time talking about his personal grievances.

What’s more, Joe Biden dedicated his term to passing a string of bills, all of which were popular and many of which were bi-partisan.¹ Voters seem not to care about any of this governing. At all.

Trump understood that American politics had transformed into an attention economy.

(5) COVID. You really aren’t going to like this, but Trump was right about the politics of COVID. At the end of the day, people cared more about the economy than the deaths.

It amazes me that today when people complain about what went wrong during COVID, they talk about business closures, travel restrictions, remote schooling, and sometimes having to wear masks in public parks.

They never talk about the 1 million Americans who died from COVID during the pandemic.

Trump understood that the living do not care about the dead.²

(6) Taiwan. America has long adhered to a policy of strategic ambiguity on whether or not it would defend Taiwan militarily. In 2019, Trump told a Republican senator, “Taiwan is like two feet from China. . . . We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f-—ing thing we can do about it.”

The war in Ukraine suggests that this is almost certainly correct: The American political system can barely do the minimum required to keep Ukraine in the fight and even that aid could end permanently after November.

There is no question that our country lacks the political will to defend Taiwan. I suspect do not even have the political will to give them military aid, should China move against the Taiwanese.

There are other things Trump understood. He figured out that impeachment was a constitutional dead-letter. He knew that criminal trials could be delayed or sabotaged by helpful judges. He pegged Nikki Haley the first moment he saw her on TV.

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In each of these instances, Donald Trump understood reality better than most people—certainly better than I did. As Katherine Miller once put it, “Trump is the grinning skeleton in the crowd; what he reveals about other people is the most important thing about him.”

I wonder:

What if Trump isn’t gaming his way into minority rule? What if he’s not trying to draw to an inside straight, like he did in 2016 and almost did in 2020?

What if his theory about who Americans really are, about what this country really wants, is right?

Happy Memorial Day.

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2. Giving

This is a powerful story:

Until the final minutes of their commencement ceremony last Thursday, the 1,200 graduates of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth thought they knew what they would remember most about it: the supremely bad weather during the outdoor ceremony, where they sat drenched and shivering in a torrential rainstorm.

Then, as they prepared to collect their diplomas, their commencement speaker, Rob Hale, a billionaire philanthropist from Boston, returned to the dripping podium. He brought along two cash-stuffed duffel bags, he announced, and would hand every graduate $1,000 as they crossed the stage — $500 to keep for themselves, and $500 to give to any good cause.

“My friends and I were looking at each other like, no way,” Ali McKelvey, one of the students, said. “We were like, this has to be a joke.”

It wasn’t. . . .

he said in an interview this week, he and his wife have found deep joy and satisfaction in giving their money away. In granting college students a chance to experience the same feeling, he said he hoped to light a spark that they will carry with them — even if he had no guarantee that they will honor his request. (He said he believes the vast majority do.)

“If they get to feel that joy themselves, then maybe it becomes something they want to do again, and make part of their own lives,” Mr. Hale, 57, said. “In America and the world, these are times of turmoil, and the more we help each other, the better off we’ll be.”

In the week since a businessman they had never met handed them two damp envelopes onstage — one labeled “GIFT” and the other “GIVE” — the new graduates have packed up dorm rooms, fine-tuned résumés and snapped last campus selfies. They have also pondered where to send what for most will be the largest charitable gift they have ever had the chance to give.

Tony da Costa, a graphic design major who graduated with high honors, considered giving his $500 to a charitable organization but decided instead to hand it over to an acquaintance of his mother, someone he has never met, who is suffering from an illness and struggling to pay bills.

“I felt like giving it to a specific person would feel better,” said Mr. da Costa, 22, who grew up in the town of Dartmouth, on the southern coast of Massachusetts not far from Cape Cod.

Kamryn Kobel, an English major, gave her $500 to the Y.W.C.A. in Worcester, Mass., where she learned to swim as a child, to support its programs for young women and survivors of violence.

Her donation felt like something to be proud of, she said — once it sank in that the envelopes she tucked under her rain poncho contained exactly what Mr. Hale had promised.

“At first, it was like, is there really going to be cash in there?” she said. “And then it was like, oh my God, it’s for real.” . . .

It is the fourth Massachusetts college campus in the last four years where Mr. Hale has thrilled graduates with his signature split gift. Each time, he has selected a public school with high concentrations of first-generation and lower-income students who have “worked their tails off to get there,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

There comes a point in every person’s life when giving becomes more fulfilling than receiving. That moment comes at different times for different people, but it might be a fair line of demarkation between childhood and adulthood.

One of the things I admire about our community here is that you guys are always giving.

When you talk to each other kindly in the comments, or share a personal story about yourself with us, you’re making a gift.

When you email me your thoughts, that’s a gift.

And when I put out the call for someone in need, you guys give. I’ve lost count of the number of times the Bulwark family has come together to help people.

I’m so grateful for that; and for all of you. Thank you, my friends. I hope you have a good weekend, filled with the people who mean the most to you.

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3. Ryan Leaf

I’ve written about Ryan Leaf before because he’s a fantastic example for all of us. John Canzano has a piece on him:

Leaf, the No. 2 pick in the draft, was three games into his rookie season and a couple of days removed from a stay in the hospital. It was a rainy, windy day. He completed his first pass of the game. Then, Leaf threw 14 straight incompletions, committing five turnovers in the first seven possessions.

The Chiefs won 23-7.

The following day in the locker room, Leaf was approached by Jay Posner of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Posner had written a story about an unflattering confrontation Leaf had with a TV cameraman after the embarrassing loss. Visiting NFL locker rooms of that era had tight, uncomfortable quarters. In the post-game fray, a cameraman’s equipment accidentally struck the quarterback in the side of his head. Leaf didn’t handle it well.

He did no better with the beat reporter the next day. Leaf started yelling, towering over Posner. Teammate Junior Seau rushed over, grabbed Leaf by the arm, and removed him from the scene. Seau threw a fully clothed Leaf in the showers, turned the cold water on, and told him: “Baby boy, we’ll talk about this later.”

Years later, after football, Leaf spiraled into drug addiction. He was indicted, arrested, and ordered to rehabilitation by the courts. He got divorced, attempted suicide, and lost a college coaching job because he allegedly asked a player for pain pills. After another series of arrests for burglary, theft, and drug charges, Leaf was sentenced to seven years in custody of the Montana Department of Corrections.

His life was a mess.

If the story had ended there, we’d have all acknowledged that it made perfect sense. Leaf isn’t the only person in sports history to crumble under the suffocating pressure of being a top draft pick. He wasn’t the only athlete to get sacked by opioids. . . .

Leaf is sober now. He got clean, remarried, and rebuilt his family. He’s working, ironically, as an analyst on the same kind of radio and television shows that used to skewer him regularly. He does lots of public speaking and talks openly about his daily battle with sobriety and the countless mistakes he’s made.

This week, Leaf came across a video clip of that 1998 football game on social media. Leaf could have ignored it. Instead, the former quarterback used the moment to craft a quick Twitter post, drawing attention to his failure to handle the moment maturely. Then, he posted it for the world to absorb.

Read the whole thing. It’s really something.

1. The American Rescue Plan; the Inflation Reduction Act; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act; the Electoral Count Reform Act; the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (gun reform); the Respect for Marriage Act. Biden also passed the most comprehensive immigration reform package ever, only to have Republicans (who negotiated the bill) kill it.

2. A reminder on this:

[I]magine that, on January 9, 2020, someone had told you that within 12 months, this virus would kill 400,000 Americans and that within 24 months the total U.S. dead would top 1 million.

What sort of policy response would you have thought would be warranted? Because I think that the public would have freaked the fork out. I think that people would have wanted to lock down everything.

But the contemporaneous Republican response—not universally, but generally—was to downplay the risks of COVID, argue against mitigation efforts, and keep life normal. . . .

People—or modern people, or at least modern Americans—care very little about the dead. They place no value on some notional number of “lives saved.” They care about one thing and one thing only: themselves.

Did COVID inconvenience them? Were they annoyed by wearing medical masks? Did it suck having to parent while working? Are they frustrated by supply-chain slowdowns? Do they take it as a personal affront when a business they like is short-staffed? Is gas “too expensive”?

These are their concerns. Yes, they would have lost their minds in January of 2020 if you had told them that a million Americans would be cut down by COVID. But they didn’t die. So they’re on to the next thing.

By and large, the Democratic response to COVID was to try to save as many lives as possible.

By and large, the Republican response to COVID was to avoid any actions which might inconvenience those who survived COVID.

It’s pretty clear that, as a political matter, the Republicans understood where the voters were—and would be.

Future voters would give Democrats no credit for saving lives and give Republicans no blame for costing them. In fact, future voters would see COVID only as a liability for officials who tried to mitigate its impact and would blame them for any policy choices which turned out—in hindsight—to be sub-optimal.